Opinion on marketing, media & more by Kevin Dugan / @prblog since 07.02

06/21/2013

Samsung teamed up with Foursquare to create “Time Machine,” a co-branded microsite that turns a consumer’s Foursquare history into content. Users can watch their history unfold in real time, get recommendations on “the next big thing” to visit and share their history in infographic form.

While the approach is familiar, the campaign is new and different in at least three ways.

Now before you go out and start snapping pics of your existing annual report and posting them to Instagram, here's why it works for the zoo.

Telling a Visual Story: The Zoo already had a very visual story to tell. Instagram helped amplify this fact. They didn't try and reverse engineer the annual report into square photos for Instagram.

Creating Snack-Sized & Healthy Content: Each page became a destination for the Zoo...helping them reinforce important points and distribute the annual report more easily online.

Supporting a Broader Plan: This execution is part of a broader plan for the Zoo as it relates not only to it's marketing efforts, but also to it's annual report...and its role in these broader efforts.

Reinforcing the Brand: The Zoo does a great job of using visuals to reinforce the experience visitors have at the Zoo as well as the broader platforms the Zoo supports, including protecting penguins for example. The point is, while there are many snack-sized messages, all of the pictures come together to support a common theme - the Calgary Zoo.

It is a great use of Instagram, a great idea for the Calgary Zoo and an important reminder to us that the restrictions of a platform can increase our creativity and not simply limit it.

05/24/2013

Twitter’s new Lead Generation Cards are the latest example of convergence in the advertising industry as social media and search create more in-stream opportunities for brands to connect with consumers.

04/28/2013

According to Mashable: "LinkedIn Contacts integrates into your email, mobile address book and calendar to create a one stop shop of sorts for all of your contacts that is accessible from the web and an app."

LinkedIn has rolled out a steady stream of design, social and content enhancements over the last six months as it aims to increase the engagement across its business platform. And this new app will certainly increase the odds that you'll be connected to your entire contact database on LinkedIn.

Community + Content x Contacts = Social CRM?To its credit, LinkedIn has never been a walled garden; you can export your contact information. And with email plugins for Outlook and GMail as well as apps like Cardmunch, it's been simple to benefit from LinkedIn data across other platforms.

LinkedIn's recent focus on community, content and contacts shows it's trying to reverse the flow of data outside the site and give users more reasons to spend time on LinkedIn. And if you look at all of the LinkedIn enhancements in aggregate, it starts to look as if we're being given a mix of tools used for "extraction, transfer and loading" of data into a customer relationship marketing (CRM) platform.

Consider if LinkedIn continued enhancing the platform and, within the next 12 months, it started offering a basic and paid level of CRM functionality to its more than 200 million members.

1) User Base: It's user base would increase and it would encourage all users to invest more time in the platform.

2) Social Business: Whether or not you consider LinkedIn a niche platform due to its business focus, by expanding its focus on contacts into CRM it becomes THE business platform and much tougher to displace.

3) Monetization: In addition to the revenue from its paid CRM services, the advertising potential would be significant. Consider a utility like email - it's open all day. Turning LinkedIn into a CRM utility would increase user exposure to advertising.

Personal CRMThere's a distinct delta between a CRM platform and the functionality that LinkedIn currently provides. But it's not so significant that it prevents the social platform from becoming a CRM platform with more than 200 million potential users on its first day of launch.

LinkedIn CRM wouldn't seemingly be able to disrupt large companies' use of enterprise-wide CRM packages, but it could usher in the trend of personal CRM. Like any idea, it's fraught with potential and peril. But it's safe to say we've only just begun to see the impact of LinkedIn's steady stream of innovations, acquisitions and enhancements.

03/06/2013

Read enough industry opinion on content marketing, and you can start to determine
each author’s professional background. If their point of view is focused on:

Interactive:
the author tends to be in digital marketing or may work with a digital agency;

Creative:
a traditional marketer might be chief storyteller, perhaps working with a
creative agency;

Editorial:
the expert could come from public relations or might work with a PR agency;

Media:
someone with paid media background, who takes a media-neutral approach to
building an audience or may be working with a digital agency.

Read Between the LinesIf I’d written this article just a few years ago, you could easily tell
my roots are in public relations. By their name alone, my two personal blogs would
confirm this assumption.

But over the last 10 years, my focus became more broadly focused in
marketing. And in the last five years, I’ve witnessed content morph into a clear
mix of editorial, design and development. My last four years at a media agency
have further evolved my point of view.

Marketing’s True NorthThis experience has taught me that the focus should always be on the
audience – regardless of your background. While this isn’t an epiphany or a deep
thought, it’s critical to remind ourselves of this timeless rule. It tends to
fade into the background when the marketing industry, inevitably, debates who
in an organization should own a new practice area.

Content marketing can’t live anywhere in the building, but it does take
a variety of stakeholders and skill sets to make it work. Regardless of where content
marketing lives in your building, make sure the team has the skill sets needed
for each phase of content marketing.

Plan:
The planning phase requires strategists with an a deep understanding of the
brand and its audience as well as an appreciation of content and media.

Publish:
Publishing requires a mix of editorial, design and creative that taps technology
to distribute and share the content as relevant.

Promote:
All content needs help being found. In addition to paid media expertise, analytics,
search marketing and social media mindsets are required.

Optimize:
The key to sustainable success is constant, informed iteration of the entire
process and the platform. A team capable of drawing insights from analytics and
relevant search data is critical.

Story or Science?Each member on a content marketing team, based on their background, will
focus on the left- or right-brain aspects of content marketing. That’s
understandable. The point is simply to make sure you’ve got the right mix of team
skills and that the focus is, first and foremost, on the audience.

And if anyone asks who should own content marketing? The answer is: the
audience.

At the recent, inaugural #solopr conference, I really enjoyed the other speakers' presentations. One of those individuals, Tom Martin, served up a simple but powerful tip regarding content creation.

Whether you're blogging, part of a brand newsroom or just creating content - think in terms of cornerstones and not just cobblestones.

Star Wars as Cobblestones and Cornerstone Star Wars offers the simplest way to understand the cornerstones vs. cobblestones concept. Each episode in the Star Wars franchise is a cobblestone. All six movies together are a cornerstone. George Lucas made one movie at a time. But he knew the entire story before he started with Epsiode 4.

Rock Solid Content StrategyYou can take two approaches to the cornerstone strategy, depending on your approach to content.

Star Wars Approach: Think the larger story through, as part of a larger strategy, but then produce this content in pieces. The other benefit to this approach? Your final piece, that aggregates each article into a larger piece of content, will benefit from reader comments and other industry news that unfold along with your ideas.

Reverse Engineer: Literally producing the entire story and then chopping it into pieces to distribute over time is a more traditional, long form approach. To be honest, it's working harder than smart...especially if you were to publish all of it immediately as a single, longform "white paper."

Regardless of how you employ the cornerstone/cobblestone approach to content, it ensures a steady pace of publishing relevant content. In fact, it's a concept I need to employ at this blog. My publishing frequency is guided solely by quality vs. quantity. If I'm not inspired, I don't write. This approach to articles on this blog would have a positive impact.

02/05/2013

While this infographic has five tips to help brands create content,** the tips apply to anyone -- including you. We encounter multiple stories on a daily basis, regardless of our job. We just need to look at things from a different, content marketing, perspective.

**Strategic Public Relations has been even slower than usual lately. It's because I'm also Editor-in-Chief at Media Is Power. It's an independent media platform I helped Empower MediaMarketing's content marketing practice create. Our editorial mission is to track the changing media landscape. It's my employer's best practice in action and I'll write more posts at some point that detail the process involved in making a sustainable content marketing plaform.

02/02/2013

Less than 10 days after it's debut, news about the Vine app is a lot like Super Bowl pre-game commentary. We've got so-called experts everywhere weighing in on who will win and who will lose. Whether you like Vine, hate it or couldn't care less whether it thrives or withers, I'm willing to bet you're missing the point of this app.

It's not about a shiny new social toy. It's not about the increasing popularity of snack-sized content, social video or the recent resurgence of the gif.

It's all about Twitter.

Twitter Tool First, Video Platform SecondVine extends Twitter's utility, giving users another reason to make the 140-character platform their social destination of choice. That's a big deal for Twitter, making it a more desirable ad platform for brands. Some suggest that Vine is as important to Twitter as YouTube was to Google.

And I'm willing to bet that a Venn diagram of Twitter and Vine users would show most of Vine's circle overlapping with Twitter's (much larger) circle. Vine's generated a lot of conversation on Twitter over the last seven days, racking up more than 26,000 mentions each day.

Controversy = Sign of SuccessUnfortunately, pornography was being posted on Vine seemingly hours after the launch. Vine responded quickly, after a brief stumble. But I'm wondering if such an early attempt to exploit the platform is more a sign of its potential than of its potential issues. Either way, you can assume the app will be tweaked on an ongoing basis to deal with its issues.

Bottom Line?Despite my opinion of Vine, the decision to tap this shiny new app for your marketing efforts comes down to a few simple questions:

Is your audience using Vine?

Is your audience using Twitter?

Does Vine allow you to reach them more effectively?

If Vine, or another other shiny new tool, doesn't help a brand more effectively connect with consumers? It's just noise.

12/19/2012

Instagram changed its terms of service earlier this week, unleashing a vocal and fast-emerging online protest. For brands, the “Instadrama” raises a more important question. As brands and their loyal consumers become invested in free online platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, what should brands do as these platforms evolve into a business? How brands react to things like a "controversial" terms of service change can have broader implications, including how consumers perceive the brand.

Rules of Disengagement?Much like the “rules of engagement” many social media teams craft when it comes to responding to negative comments online, perhaps brands should consider “rules of platform disengagement.” At a minimum, the following tips should help prevent any rash decisions and, more importantly, it can help ensure a brand’s investment in a platform is not lost.

12/17/2012

Storify’s new
site design makes it easier to find relevant content on the site. As part
of the more cosmetic changes to the site, Storify also became the latest social
platform to add landscape header photos to its users’ profiles.

The changes might also be designed to make Storify less of a
distribution tool and more of a destination platform. A quick review of active users shows that few have updated their profiles to
capitalize on the new header design. It’s a telling sign that more Storify
users tap the social curation tool through content management platforms instead
of through the site

I've been playing with Storify to curate
content for posts. It's a great tool -- one I'll bet you're either not
using, or not using to its full potential. Regardless of your Storify-savvy,
here are three tips to help you pwn
Storify.

1) Curate
Cross-Platform ContentStorify is used by most to capture Twitter conversations. The
ability to pull in tweets on a certain topic, before they vanish from Twitter’s
short-term memory, to select and then organize
the best ones into a story is certainly an example of where Storify shines.

But Storify allows you to pull in content from several
platforms including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Tumblr. You can also pull
in direct URLs to easily add content. In an age of distributed storytelling, the
need to pull in content from across multiple platforms is important.

One example of using Storify to contain a fast-emerging, distributed
story is the #SignalPG
Storify I built. It’s based on the Signal
event held at Procter & Gamble earlier this year. Storify made it
simple to curate content from Twitter, Instagram and YouTube to give a brief event
overview of the event.

2) Get
Creative With Curation (like Moleskine, Lego & MIT)And while Storify is typically used to capture temporary
moments, like Twitter chats or events, it can be used for projects with longer
timelines as well. For a recent product launch, Moleskine tapped
Storify to create an online clip book. In addition to news, the brand captured
consumer conversation for an even more potent compilation of buzz emanating
from the co-branded product launch.The ability to organize all of the conversation, add context
and then embed it anywhere reminds us of Storify’s utility. Creativity is the
only limitation as to where and how it can be used. This behind
the scenes tour of MIT’s Media Lab. Is a great example of using Storify to
give your audience access to something they can’t get elsewhere. And you’re not
limited to one platform in doing so.

3) Become
a Power UserThis post assumes most users start and stop their use of
Storify with Twitter chats. But there are a variety of ways to get more out of
the site.

Plug-In: Using Storify as a browser plug-in is not
just more convenient and efficient, it makes for a much smoother
embed, including eliminating duplicate titles between your blog post and
the curated story.

Research: If you’re using Storify just to curate and distribute
your own content, keep in mind a variety of brands and media
outlets use it. The end result is an untapped platform for informal
research on a variety of topics.

Miscellany: From tapping into each story’s analytics
to clicking “View All” on a user’s profile to see all of their stories, there
are a few basic steps worth remembering. More basic steps are included in "Getting Started.” This
story is automatically generated for every profile and worth walking through. And
while you’re at it, if you have a profile on the site, update your header photo!

Other Brands Crushing
It On StorifyWe’ve seen a broad variety of brands demonstrating how Storify can help
content marketing efforts. Here are a few that stand out in addition to the
ones highlighted above.

Vanderbilt:The
Vanderbilt news room curates tweets and
Instagram pics into a weekly buzz roundup to engage students and other
university fans while creating promotional content.